The stranger was a guest of Halson's, and Halson himself was a
comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our dining-club,
and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our little group,
though one could not be sure that he was very well known to Minver. The
stranger had been dining with Halson, and we had found the two smoking
together, with their cups of black coffee at their elbows, before the
smouldering fire in the Turkish room when we came in from dinner--my
friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge the sentimentalist, Minver the
painter, and myself. It struck me for the first time that a fire on the
hearth was out of keeping with a Turkish room, but I felt that the cups
of black coffee restored the lost balance in some measure.
Before we had settled into our wonted places--in fact, almost as we
entered--Halson looked over his shoulder and said: "Mr. Wanhope, I want
you to hear this story of my friend's. Go on, Newton--or, rather, go
back and begin again--and I'll introduce you afterwards."
The stranger made a becoming show of deprecation. He said he did not
think the story would bear immediate repetition, or was even worth
telling once, but, if we had nothing better to do, perhaps we might do
worse than hear it; the most he could say for it was that the thing
really happened. He wore a large, drooping, gray mustache, which, with
the imperial below it, quite hid his mouth, and gave him, somehow, a
martial effect, besides accurately dating him of the period between the
latest sixties and earliest seventies, when his beard would have been
black; I liked his mustache not being stubbed in the modern manner, but
allowed to fall heavily over his lips, and then branch away from the
corners of his mouth as far as it would. He lighted the cigar which
Halson gave him, and, blowing the bitten-off tip towards the fire,
began:
"It was about that time when we first had a ten-o'clock night train from
Boston to New York. Train used to start at nine, and lag along round by
Springfield, and get into the old Twenty-sixth Street Station here at
six in the morning, where they let you sleep as long as you liked. They
call you up now at half-past five, and, if you don't turn out, they haul
you back to Mott Haven, or New Haven, I'm not sure which. I used to go
into Boston and turn in at the old Worcester Depot, as we called it
then, just about the time the train began to move, and I usually got a
fine night's rest in the course of the nine or ten hours we were on the
way to New York; it didn't seem quite the same after we began saying
Albany Depot: shortened up the run, somehow.
[Illustration: "NO BURGLAR COULD HAVE MISSED ME IF HE HAD WANTED AN EASY
MARK"]
"But that night I wasn't very sleepy, and the porter had got the place
so piping hot with the big stoves, one at each end of the car, to keep
the good, old-fashioned Christmas cold out, that I thought I should be
more comfortable with a smoke before I went to bed; and, anyhow, I could
get away from the heat better in the smoking-room. I hated to be leaving
home on Christmas Eve, for I never had done that before, and I hated to
be leaving my wife alone with the children and the two girls in our
little house in Cambridge. Before I started in on the old horse-car for
Boston, I had helped her to tuck the young ones in and to fill the
stockings hung along the wall over the register--the nearest we could
come to a fireplace--and I thought those stockings looked very weird,
five of them, dangling lumpily down, and I kept seeing them, and her
sitting up sewing in front of them, and afraid to go to bed on account
of burglars. I suppose she was shyer of burglars than any woman ever was
that had never seen a sign of them. She was always calling me up, to go
down-stairs and put them out, and I used to wander all over the house,
from attic to cellar, in my nighty, with a lamp in one hand and a poker
in the other, so that no burglar could have missed me if he had wanted
an easy mark. I always kept a lamp and a poker handy."
The stranger heaved a sigh as of fond reminiscence, and looked round for
the sympathy which in our company of bachelors he failed of; even the
sympathetic Rulledge failed of the necessary experience to move him in
compassionate response.
"Well," the stranger went on, a little damped perhaps by his failure,
but supported apparently by the interest of the fact in hand, "I had the
smoking-room to myself for a while, and then a fellow put his head in
that I thought I knew after I had thought I didn't know him. He dawned
on me more and more, and I had to acknowledge to myself, by and by, that
it was a man named Melford, whom I used to room with in Holworthy at
Harvard; that is, we had an apartment of two bedrooms and a study; and I
suppose there were never two fellows knew less of each other than we did
at the end of our four years together. I can't say what Melford knew of
me, but the most I knew of Melford was his particular brand of
nightmare."
Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took his
cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an "Ah!"